Slowing Down

[notgull]

Hello,

As of Monday I will be starting a new full time job. This means that I won't have as much time to dedicate to open source software as I have been over the past year. Therefore I will not be actively adding new features to smol-rs crates. I will still do bugfixes, respond to issues/PRs, and other general maintenance items. But, once smol 2.0 is released, I will not add anything else to these crates. Which is probably good, since the crates are pretty much complete.

Here's some highlights from the past year:

• Reimplementing the Windows backend for polling in pure Rust, removing our only C dependency
• Reworking event-listener to be much faster and no_std
• Adding metadata and panic propagation to async-task.
• This tracker for potentially useful features
• Creating/extracting the piper and async-signal crates.
• And more!

Things that I meant to do that I never got around to, that would probably be much appreciated if someone wanted to take them up:

• async-process uses signals to handle process events. This is inefficient and doesn't scale to high numbers of processes. A more optimized implementation would use pidfd on Linux, EVFILT_PROC on BSD, and waitable handles on Windows.
• Speaking of async-process, it doesn't necessarily need to spawn another entire thread to run the process reactor. It can very easily be made async and run as a task. This would likely eliminate some overhead.
• Speaking of waitable handles, I kind of solved Support waitable objects on Windows 10 async-io#25 but not really. Right now the waitable handles just use a thread pool, but it could be vastly more efficient with NtAssociateWaitCompletionPacket.
• Speaking of that, I never exposed waitable handles in async-io.
• The "next task" optimization for async-executor is low hanging fruit that would vastly improve our microbenchmarks.

It's been a pleasure. I'm not going anywhere, I just won't be opening as many PRs... although that will probably be a relief to not get spammed by me for reviews :-)

• John "notgull" Nunley

[taiki-e]

Thanks for all your hard work!